Efficient Approval Helps Everyone

The reporting of expenses when you’re doing it the old fashioned way is something that happens after the fact. An employee you’ve sent off to do a job has to try to diligently collect every receipt over the course of the trip, then bring them back, try to match them up with purchases, fill out the expense report and then wait for approval.

Once the report is submitted, a member of your financial department has to set the time aside to go over all the items, review them, approve them, and finally get the reimbursement process going. Or, if there is a problem with the report, flag or decline certain items, and then spend even more time trying to resolve the issue with the employee before that reimbursement can finally be sorted out.

There Is A Better Way

Traditional expense reporting has a lot of starts, stops and gaps before the process runs to completion. But with modern, automated system, using expense report software such as ExpensePoint, a lot of these inefficiencies in time can be eliminated.

Employees only filing a complete report at the end of a trip can be replaced with expense report apps built right into their phones. They can take just a few seconds, right after a transaction, to file the report, and even take a photo of the receipt using their phone so they don’t have to spend the trip collecting receipts.

For financial staff, they can also be automatically notified whenever a new expense has been filed, and take a live tally of the expenses by consulting the “living report” online, reviewing each individual item and approving—or declining and flagging—specific items before bigger problems crop up.

This means that a complete expense report no longer has to be rejected because of one or two suspect items. And in the case of employees making a simple mistake, flagging or declining them right away means the problems can be addressed very quickly, before it grows into an even bigger problem at the return conclusion of the trip.